Riding with the hounds

Riding with the hounds

Thursday 16 September 2004 20.25 EDT
First published on Thursday 16 September 2004 20.25 EDT

I am married to a master of hounds. I knew people in the countryside were increasingly angry about the prospect of a hunt ban. But the coach party that left our Warwickshire kennels on Wednesday were unlikely rioters. They could have been a random sample from a crowd in any provincial town.

Why would old men and middle-aged women be prepared to face baton-wielding policemen? For some people football or music is a part of who they are. For these people, it's hunting. In England it alone can give you the physical sense of being part of a still wild country. Fences and roads disappear as you follow the fox wherever he chooses to lead. To ban it is to take away a closeness to nature and a freedom they believe is worth losing everything for.

At the front of the coach was a 50-year-old man who was almost killed in a hunting accident two years ago. His sight has never recovered, but he still rides to hounds, still takes crashing falls. Earlier in the week his wife had been talking heatedly of taking horse-boxes to block the M25. They had been dissuaded - just.

At the service-station stop the chairman of the hunt, a GP, stood up to give us a talk. We had heard of Gandhi? We should remember the success of his peaceful protests. There should be no blocking of motorways, no violence. The couple at the front squirmed.

My husband fears that hunts will tear themselves apart in the next 18 months. Some masters will try to save a few jobs and hounds by creating drag hunts, but others will regard this as treachery. A ban will prove we are living under an elective dictatorship, they argue. Some 400,000 people marched against the ban and a million against the war. We still invaded Iraq; now hunting is still going to be banned.

There is a sense that politicians, journalists and bankers collude against the rest. The hotheads who broke into the Commons shouted about pensions as well as foxes; people's savings have been stolen by greedy men with large bonuses, but nothing is done.

The coach dropped us at noon. In Parliament Square the Countryside Alliance handed out red cards saying: "No Ban" for us to wave. But the radical Countryside Action Network also handed us an itinerary. It told us not to be concerned by balaclavas or bonfires and instructed us to lie down in the road after 3pm. Three hours passed with platitudes being delivered over the loudspeaker in stirring tones.

Conservative MPs touted for support, but only succeeded in irritating. At 3.15pm protesters moved towards the barricades facing the Houses of Parliament. "Come on, chaps, it's a free country," said our half-blind friend. Scuffles broke out; police hats flew in the air. People were being pushed from behind and couldn't go back. Women raised their hands in an attitude of surrender as the batons came down. An old man in a tweed suit and tie staggered out, blood pouring from his head.

Most of our group had kept back from the trouble. Others extracted themselves from the scrum and obeyed the chairman's directive to return to the coach at 4pm. "I was bloody frightened," one confessed later after we had clambered aboard.

Morale, however, was higher than it had been that morning and the talk was animated. One man had been interviewed on the radio. He said: "The reporter asked: 'Is this the end?'. I told her it was only the the beginning."

I called the Countryside Alliance press office on the journey home. It declared the scuffles "unnecessary and unfortunate". Another call and I learned about the break-in on the floor of the House of Commons. Cheers broke out as word spread. I didn't join in. I knew it would mean insistence on greater security, more distance between people and their representatives.

Our MPs have been quick to send young soldiers to face death in the most dangerous corners of the world. They should be prepared to take their chances too. Elizabeth I addressed crowds when there was a papal fatwa on her head and offered to share the dangers of her troops in wartime; can't our elected representatives show the same courage?

As we arrived back in Warwickshire that night, the half-blind man stood up to speak. He acknowledged a difference of opinion with the hunt chairman. We had done the peaceful demonstrations, he declared. The time had come to fight for what we love. He was loudly applauded. "Yes, we've got to fight, haven't we?" a man said to me. I suggested that perhaps we should try the courts. It sounded weak, and he looked disgusted.

ě Leanda de Lisle's book on James VI and I is published in the spring.